The crimes are shockingly similar: an inebriated victim, a group of teenage boys committing sexual assault and then, to the horror of all, photos and videos of the crime recorded and distributed for everyone to see.

For Rehtaeh Parsons , 17, who committed suicide earlier this month, the photo of her assault was almost as damaging as the crime itself. Months after the Cole Harbour, N.S., teen was allegedly raped by four boys as she lay unconscious at a party, one horrific image from that night remained on the cellphones of her classmates. The picture, described by her mother, was of one of the perpetrators smiling and giving a thumbs-up as he assaulted the teenager. It was almost as if he was performing for an audience.

In these cases, rape is just one horrific part of the equation. Equally disturbing is trying to determine what lurks in the minds of these young perpetrators.

“You have to ask yourself, what 15-year-old boy thinks there is a girl who wants to have sex with four boys and to what extent he thinks this is expected or normal? And you have to ask, where do they get these ideas from?” said Peter Jaffe, a professor at the Centre for Research and Education on Violence Against Women and Children at Western University. “It’s not from sex education they are getting in school.”

One hypothesis: exposure to pornography. At no other time has pornography — including violent pornography — been so easily accessible for children of all ages. In one U.S. survey, 70 per cent of 15- to 17-year-olds said they had watched porn, while a Canadian study found boys as young as 10 have experienced pornography. By the time they reached 20, the same study found it was almost impossible to find men who hadn’t viewed X-rated material.

Pornography can’t be solely blamed for what appears to be an increase in rape or sexual violence. However, academics, researchers and scientists say there is little doubt that the use of porn among teenagers is having a profound impact on their notions of normal sexual behaviour, their views on women and their ability to even identify what constitutes sexual violence.

“There was rape before porn, and if you could somehow magically remove porn, there would still be rape,” said Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity . “It’s kind of silly to assume that mass media and porn is responsible for violence, but it’s not ridiculous to assume that these mediums reinforce values that lead to violence.”

Fans of pornography cite years of Playboy and Hustler magazines as proof that pornography has long been a part of mainstream culture and that it can help broaden our horizons and improve our sexual lives.

But almost all academics admit the current “golden age” of pornography is unprecedented. The 24-7 access to multiple images and videos in a few clicks, including violent pornography, has never been experienced and its repercussions are unknown.

And they argue the “benefits” of pornography are debatable. In a 2010 analysis of 50 randomly selected adult films, researchers found high levels of verbal and physical aggression. Of the 304 scenes analyzed, 88 per cent contained physical aggression, including spanking, gagging and slapping, while nearly 50 per cent contained verbal abuse, particularly name-calling. In most cases, the men were dominant and the women almost always responded neutrally or with pleasure. Only 10 per cent of scenes contained positive sexual behaviour.

“This is not your father’s pornography,” said Jaffe. “Most pornography now looks to degrade and humiliate women. It’s not about healthy relationships, and I think if a teen is seeing those messages over and over again, it does have an impact.”

It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that a number of studies looking at the effect of pornography have found it to have negative overall effects in adults, and in particularly men: increased sexually aggressive behaviour, adverse effects on intimate relationships, and acceptance of rape myths, which trivialize rape or blame the victim.

A U.S.-based 2011 study of 10- to 15-year-olds over three years yielded similar results. The 1,200 kids were asked if they had seen X-rated material, included sexually violent material, and if they were involved in sexually aggressive behaviour within the same year.

“Our data supported this hypothesis that when you look at kids who report viewing violent X-rated material, they are significantly more likely to report sexually violent behaviour,” said Michele L. Ybarra, a lead researcher with the Center for Innovative Public Health Research. “Kids who reported non-violent material had almost the same behaviour as those who reported no exposure to porn at all.”

The study found that those who watched violent X-rated material were six times more likely to self-report sexually aggressive behaviour.

Jaffe says he is not surprised at such findings. “There are websites dedicated to forced non-consensual sex with drunken inebriated women. There are training manuals on how to do it, and how to get it away with it,” he said. “I am convinced that the more violent porn out there, you are going to see an increase in non-consensual sexual activity.”

A teenager’s brain is an ideal haven for pornography. Between the ages of 10 and 15, the teenage brain is in a heightened state of sexual development and maturity. This is also when many kids are first being exposed to pornography. Scientists have discovered the teenage brain is not exactly like the adult one — and that may influence how their brain responds to sex on demand.

In recent years, scientists have done brain scans of children from early childhood through to age 20 to track brain development. For years the assumption had been that that gray matter — the thinking part of the brain — peaked at early childhood and gradually decreased. Instead, scans indicate that the volume of gray matter is highest during early adolescence, giving the brain enhanced elasticity, yet delaying its progress into adulthood. That’s because gray matter matures in a back-to-front pattern with the frontal lobe the last to develop. This is perhaps most relevant, as this part of the brain is responsible for executive functions, such as planning, controlling impulses, judgement and reasoning.

MRI scans of teen brains also show that it is actively involved in a process of building neural connections, and thus the grey matter forges and prunes neural pathways. Scientists believe the “use-it-or-lose-it” process is actively at work here — and that how a teenager spends his days and nights will likely determine how his brain will ultimately be wired.

Brain scans have also found the teenage brain is dominated by areas associated with pleasure and reward, and emotional response, perhaps explaining the emotional roller-coaster years associated with puberty.

This volatile situation taking place within the teenage brain may make it more susceptible to the lure and long-term effects of pornography, scientists believe.

“In the teenage brain there is an imbalance of power between the thrill-seeking part of the brain, the reward circuit and the frontal cortex part of the brain, the higher brain that controls impulses and consequences,” said Gary Wilson, a physiologist and founder of the website www.yourbrainonporn.com . “This leads to the urge to seek thrills, especially sexual thrills, like Internet porn, and there is no inhibition of that.”

He also believes that if teenagers spend their adolescence watching pornography, their brains may “rewire” themselves to need such stimulus to be aroused.

Wilson said that in extreme cases of use, in both teenagers and adults, the brain reacts the same way to pornography as it does to other addictions.

However, some critics debunk such theories on pornography addiction as “pseudo-science.” They say there is no concrete scientific evidence that pornography is as addictive as drugs, or that it has the same detrimental outcomes as substance abuse. Studies on teenagers are even more difficult to administer, due to the sensitive subject matter.

“It is difficult research to do because you can’t ethically expose underage people to pornography,” said Ybarra, who adds that in most cases research to youth is limited to self-administered surveys. “But the work is made even more difficult because people have a hard time untangling the scientific and the moral arguments around pornography.”

Another complicating factor is that, while pornography consumption may be up, the “official” numbers of documented rapes are down.

“Rape remains at its lowest level in 40 years cross-nationally, for both juvenile and adults . . . even at a time when porn is everywhere,” said Christopher J. Ferguson, an associate professor of psychology and criminal justice at Texas A&M International University.

Ferguson has done a meta-analysis of all studies looking at the correlation between porn and aggression and found the linkages were hardly convincing. “We are just not seeing that relationship.”

But one problem is that the definition of rape has never been clear cut, said Jensen. The views of college students in the U.S. are proof. One study by the U.S. Justice Department on the sexual victimization of college women found that 28 out of 1,000 female students were victims of an assault. Other studies have it pegged as high as one in four. Since rape is the most under-reported crime in the U.S., the rates of prevalence vary. A study of male undergraduates found that nearly a quarter of them admitted they had acted sexually aggressively on a date, causing their date to cry, scream or plead.

And for both men and women, their understanding of what constitutes rape is also alarming. Almost 75 per cent of women whose experience meets the legal definition of rape don’t recognize themselves as victims.

In the same survey, one in 12 men admitted to acting in ways that met the legal definition of rape or attempted rape, but 84 per cent of them said what they did was “definitely not rape.”

It’s an understanding that experts believe will continue to shift.

“If contemporary porn shows scenes that are cruel, degrading and violent to women, how does that affect the perception of those who are raping and being raped? Do they become more accepting of acts that would be deemed rape years ago? It could be that porn is shifting the way we even understand the term rape,” said Jensen.

As for the other side effects of pornography on society, most experts say we will have to wait and see.

“We are running a massive experiment on an entire generation of people,” Jensen said. “We are exposing them to incredible levels of this hypersexualized media with no idea of the effect. Some of what we are seeing now (with these gang-rape cases) is hinting at this.”

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